August Death Club Digest
A brief recap of our August weekend together, followed by where we’re headed and a how to prepare.
Recap
Next Month: What to expect
Everyone: Common threads
Reflection Questions
Choose Your Own Adventure: Optional threads
Recap
Timeline of US deathways explored in an interactive activity.
Introduction to the value of “emotional granularity”inspired by Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown.
Empathy and Empathy Misses, aka “barriers to connection” if the primary need is actually connection provided by wiseheartpdx.org.
Types of Grief from What’s Your Grief: Anticipatory, Ambiguous, Nonfinite, Cumulative, Absent(or Delayed), Prolonged or Complicated, Disenfranchised.
J. William Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning.
The Beginners Guide to the End by BJ Miller and Soshanna Berger. A hard copy is available to you all, but it’s also available as an audiobook(read beautifully IMHO by the authors) and ebook for those interested.
Sharing Life Maps, a way to share the parts of our personal story that stick out to us in this time and space.
Porcupine Stank.
Next Month
September 16, 1pm - 8:30pm Potluck @ 6pm Overnight camping and accommodations available, but check in first to let me know so we can plan ahead.
End-of-Life web of services, bureaucracies, professionals and practitioners we may encounter.
Hopes, fears, questions regarding our own death or the death of loved ones.
Planning ahead: the paperwork and choices, plus what gets in the way.
Dye Surprise: The start of an optional and communal dye project that incorporates garden plants and local mushrooms, that culminates in a final functional craft directly applicable to death care.
Everyone
Common Threads…3-6 hours
Grab your copy of the Beginners Guide to the End. Please read the Introduction and Planning Ahead sections to pg 76. Then familiarize yourself with their resource page...at least enough to know what they provide.
Find and review your state’s Advance Directive online or a physical copy if you have one available.
Read “Good Death” Request Access, from the book Advice for Future Corpses by palliative nurse and Oregon local, Sallie Tisdale.
Listen to All There Is with Garrison Cooper, Episode 2 where he interviews Stephen Colbert. The two grapple with their own losses and grief.
Reflection Questions
What does a “Good Death” mean or look like to you?
What are your thoughts and feeling on dignity, autonomy and control at the end of life?
As you review your state’s Advance Directive, what questions, resistance, thoughts or feeling come up?
What aspects of the grief podcast stuck out to you or were there parts with which you identified?
And how does gratitude fit into your loss and grief emotional landscape, if at all?
Choose Your Own Adventure
Extra Optional Threads
On choices when planning ahead…
If you’re interested in why we may want to question CPR as a baseline of emergency care and choose a Do Not Resuscitate(DNR) order, here is a New Yorker article written by a palliative care doctor The Hidden Harms of CPR . It provides perspective on the importance of knowing the risks and complexities of this practice. If you find it behind a paywall, here’s a shorter NPR article with all the basics, but less layers of contextual storytelling.
On communication with doctors and family members regarding terminal illness…
The Conversation Project provides reflective inquiry to help guide conversations with medical staff and others after a terminal diagnosis and prognosis. SpeakSooner also provides videos, blog articles and a reflective workbook(on our library shelf) for navigating conversations with family or medical teams throughout a terminal illness or at end-of-life.
On building our Grief Understanding…
The website What’s Your Grief is well organized and has some helpful info. There’s a whole section devoted to Supporting Grievers, which can be handy. Their book by the same name is on our library shelf to explore.
The Dougy Center is hosting a webinar September 7th Becoming Grief Informed. I’ve been told it is similar to the webinar I attended during training. I’ll share aspects of this webinar, but Monique is more eloquent and experienced(PhD), so if you have the resources and an interest in grief principles/theory, it may be worth your while.
This resource Being Grief-Informed: From Understanding to Action by Dougy Center is helpful grief advocacy tool.
Watching & Listening…still optional
Watch this episode of Planning with Pride, part 1 of a webinar series created by Portland Friendly House Elder Pride Services. Speakers discuss the reasons for planning ahead, important paperwork to complete, an introduction to end-of-life doulas, reasons we avoid planning and the benefits of moving beyond our hesitations.
The adult animated series Midnight Gospel on Netflix is a sit back, maybe even with some favorite mind altering helpers, and enjoy the ride…or don’t…sort of affair. I did. I recommend reading a little about the series first at the above link, then start with episode 8, in which he interviews his mother who has cancer. If you’re into the style, check out 7, where he interviews Caitlyn Doughty of Order of the Good Death(one of the “aggressively hip” people Tisdale refers to in the assigned reading). If nothing else, it’s hard not to appreciate how Clancy spacecrafts from one dimension to another.
For a light-hearted but moving culture clash of perspectives on dying and grieving, based on a true story, check out The Farewell by Lulu Wang. It is likely behind a paywall, but if you’re looking for something thought and heart provoking but not a “downer” then I highly recommend it. I watched it on Amazon a year ago.
I spent January and February of 2022 spinning yarn on my wheel while listening to the local grief podcast Grief Out Loud, created by Dougy Center. Great host and the stories are often illuminating.
Welp, that’s a wrap. You’ll hear from me again a week or so ahead of our next meet-up. Until then, I’ll look forward to sharing space and time with you all as we really start sinking into this stuff.